Depression

I heard about a friend being depressed the other day. It got me wondering whether I’d ever been really depressed, depressed enough to consider suicide. I don’t think I have, but I think I can understand the feeling.

Jobless Loser

The most depressed I’ve been was when I was about 17-18. I’d left school and failed out of college. I lived with my parents. I had no job. I remember waking up about about 5:30 one morning and looking out my bedroom window. My dad was loading his car ready for work. I had a sudden realisation that he did this every morning. He leaves the house, he goes to work, he works his balls off, and he comes home. And he had done that all my life, and before I was even born. And I was lying in a bed that his hard work paid for, in a house that his hard work pays for. Doing nothing to make his life easier.

Mental Crisis

There was a crisis in my mind. On the one hand I knew I was a worker, and I wanted to support myself, I didn’t want my parents to have to support me. On the other hand everything seemed fucked. The whole world is fucked. You get a job you hate, you work it for 50 years to pay for 10 years off at the end, then you die. What’s the point? To buy a house? A car? It’s completely futile. And millions of people are taking part in it. Ants on an ant-hill. Who would even notice if I didn’t take part? In 200 years I’m not going to be remembered, my existence doesn’t matter.

Why did everyone else?

There’s a few realisations that I had over the years that helped me get over this feeling. When you think of your ancestors you tend to think back 50, 100, 200 years. But when you think about it you have ancestors going back to the very start of time. Millions of years. Hundreds of thousands of ancestors. Each one of those lived long enough to create the next – from the first cells 2,000 million years ago, to primates 100 million years ago, to you. You have a blood line all the way back there.

This might make you feel even more meaningless. But it couldn’t be more the opposite if it tried. Imagine if one of those guys 100 million years ago just thought fuck it, unsubscribed. None of their ancestors would have been created. My maths isn’t great but I would guess that there would be about 10,000,000 less people on the planet right now (assuming avg breeding age is 20, and avg children is 3). That seems like it would have had a pretty significant effect. This could be interpreted as meaning that if you’re not a breeder you’re useless. But that’s not the case, nature wouldn’t create non-breeders if that was true.

The Meaning Of Life

Which brings me to the real meaning of life. To protect and nurture your family, friends, the human race, animals and plants – in that order. This is why people get jobs and go to work every day. It’s why my dad got up at 5AM every morning. If you don’t like the system try to find a cheat-code, but don’t completely discount getting a job in the meantime. Your current job doesn’t define you and it isn’t for life.

The more people you help in your life the more meaningful you have been. It works the other way around, if you kill someone you have probably killed hundreds of thousands of future generations of people.

I’m being extreme. It’s more granular. Maybe by being a programmer I have got 3 kids into programming. Maybe one of those grows up and becomes a teacher and teaches 100,000 kids to program. Maybe one of those kids uses his new logical brain function to cure malaria, leading to millions of lives being saved. That’s millions of people that would be dead if it wasn’t for you.

Nowadays

I get down sometimes. I probably wouldn’t even describe it as depression, it’s more of a grey feeling. But it always seems to be that it happens in waves. One month I’ll feel awesome for a week, the next I’ll feel shit for a week. I think the realisation that it happens in waves helps me. It’s like realising you’re dreaming in a dream, you take control.

So now if I feel down I try to apply logic to that. I’m feeling down, why is that? Has someone been mean about me on the internet? Fuck them, no-one’s talking about them. Is Sarah being a bitch? Hug her. Is some code I wrote bad? Sleep on it, it’ll be better tomorrow. Does it feel like a mood wave? Doing some exercise cures this pretty much instantly.

This was a very good post! I do, however, partly disagree with you in the meaning of life. In my personal opinion, the meaning of life is doing whatever it takes to make oneself feel like life is worth living. It’s hard to help the people around you when you feel like shit, so you kinda gotta get care of yourself first. Again though, great post! I’m gonna give you a shout-out at my blog :D.

You little sook. “FEEL BAD FOR ME” Tactic is a load of crap. What was worse is you tried to make it look like you feeling bad is a victim thing. Go Kill Your Self. Remove the world of your self. Get on with life, if your gonna cry and claim victim of emotions, you should kill your self.

Wow, so compassionate. Scum like you are precisely the reason depressed people should NOT suicide or self-harm in any way. Instead, if you’re THAT depressed and not getting better, maybe it’d make more sense to pick up a gun, go to a place where you think there’ll be lots of “Iron Pi” types and waste as many of them as you can, ventilating those black-hearted bastards! When the police arrive, drop your gun and surrender to them. DO NOT die. Make sure you leave a note explaining your motives first incase you don’t survive it. If this happens enough then maybe society will start to address the underlying causes of these serious, corrosive problems instead of continually brushing it under the carpet. Iron Pi, you truly sicken me.

@ Santiago & James, while I appreciate your views represent the posher 50% of mainstream mantra, try to imagine that from this moment forward you earn 25% of your current salary, are subject to 70%-80% state imposed income tax, have 0 savings and have nothing valuable to sell in case of emergency. There are entire countries where a top surgeon earns about the same as an US burger flipper. Millions and millions of people are trying to pursue happiness in such circumstances. If money for them associates closely with breathing air, can you say “breathing != happiness” ?

Sir Finlay, I do indeed see your point. Poverty can cause depression, and people do seek to have a respectable spot in society, but I believe even when people have loads of money, depression can still be there.

Santiago, here’s what I intended to emphasize in Bogdan’s frustrated point: the amount of money we are all indirectly referring to, is big enough to trivialize any obstacles to happiness that remain – provided the holder is of bright mind, which he is.
If he is still unable to uplift his world despite such mind and money, it indicates his methods are flawed. Bogdan would’ve probably phrased it “he is a wuss” for not addressing the flaws.

I probably shouldn’t tell you this because I don’t want you to get depressed like me, but even if you get rich like you’ve accomplished, you know that after you die there’s a high probability that you’ll be born poor again or so Einstein implied. The pharaohs knew this and the rich did everything they could to try to avoid being born poor by burying their tombs inside the pyramids.

Believe me, depression is something you never want to have. And yeah, we go to work everyday and then die, but in-between we can do things we want to do, meet some interesting people; the meaning of life is what you make it.

The fact that it comes in waves is normal. It’s kind of like a male period. Over the course of roughly one month, we go through a hormonal high, and a low. I feel like shit everytime I hit the low, but I try to schedule all my imporant things on the highs.

Very good post!
You can be very proud of you, and I like the way you’re thinking.
Everyone is depressed on any day, its humanly.
But like 2Pac said: “For every dark night, there’s a brighter day.”
I wish you a successful and healthy future
p.s. sorry for my bad english ;)

Funny, because I am exactly in the same situation that you were in your younger days.
But, you know what? Every day is a new opportunity. And I’m glad that I read your post, because now I know I’m not the only one in the same situation.

I’ve had a huge depression with panic attacks last half of year. It took very long time for me to understand that something in is fucked up and I’m becoming one of the “ants”) The only thing you can do to make this feeling go away is to do something that you always wanted to. Or at least do something for yourself. We’re all just should live our life and act like we always wanted too! Everybody is a person, but sometimes people forget about it and live the different life, which they never wanted

Hey Garry, nice post btw. I definitely identified with those things you wrote. I currently work as a programmer in a government agency, but I hate my job. With my waves of grey feeling not helping much, I intended to work with something I like, but paycheck is kind of low to sustain my future job whose courses are like thousands of dollars. I’ll get through it, thinking that this won’t be forever and, actually, work with something I like. Anyway, nice post.

That you feel grateful for all the blessings in your life makes you a decent and moral person, very nice post and helping someone with depression, especially family or close friends is extremely tough and can give you depression as well because of the anxiety, physical and emotional stress it puts on you as well.

We really have it great, playing Rust I realized that if I were put in that situation I couldn’t even produce a durable stone hatchet. In the industrialized and even newly industrialized countries we live better than all the Kings and Emperors before us. We have clean water, easy access to food and tools, entertainment beyond imagination and even being on welfare we are able to enjoy luxury.

That doesn’t help much when the heavy cloud of depression hangs over you, but taking a moment to reflect on our life compared to 99,99% of humanity that has been before us makes suicide a very dishonorable thing when you compare your own emotional strife to those of the past.

You don’t know what depression is, you may never know what it is, and I don’t expect you to.

Your ignorance to a very serious mental condition is … common among people that just don’t get it.

Let me explain it to you,

Depression is a mental state that you can’t just “get over”. No matter what you or anyone else says. It wont make a difference.

The whole point to depression is that the effected persons can’t escape a negative state, it’s impossible for them to see anything during this period in a positive light. After the state ends they realise how stupid it was, and that life isn’t so bad and they wonder why Ice Cream for example didn’t make them happy like it does now.

While not many people know much about depression, what I can tell you is that it is a spiral impossible to escape from until I assume your body corrects it’s flow of serotonin, or whatever it does.

But thanks for your pointless penny on depression thrown into the big well of internet blogs. How about you actually invest some of your easily earned pennies into depression research programs ? Actual help for people who need it ?

Have you ever noticed that most NHS mental health facilities in the UK are run down, look like shit, have paint peeling off the walls, have you ever considered how that must feel for people that have to go to them? You know why that is? Because humans are incapable of seeing past their own family and bloodlines, everyone else might as well rot.

Good luck. Lucky one. No wonder you have no idea about depression.

But no thank you for your pep talk, your meaning of life, and such fourth, thanks for all your great wisdom all knowing buffoon. Must feel great to have all these kids lick your rim on every doting word.